


Be My Friend, Don't Go Away

by joyfulsongbird



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: F/M, kid!eurydice, kid!orpheus, orpheus is on the spectrum btw, so softe, they're adorable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2021-01-27 03:23:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21385270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joyfulsongbird/pseuds/joyfulsongbird
Summary: Eurydice wanders through the forest by her town when she doesn't want to be at home, she goes there to feel safe for once. she's usually alone so it surprises her when he finds a young musician sitting in a clearing strumming a song.
Relationships: Eurydice/Orpheus (Hadestown), Hermes & Orpheus (Hadestown)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 38





	Be My Friend, Don't Go Away

**Author's Note:**

  * For [@nightshade300](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=%40nightshade300).

Eurydice doesn’t like her house, all her friends (well, the few friends she does have) say they love their houses and their rooms and their moms and dads. she doesn’t. she knows somehow she’s supposed to love her home and her mom and dad, but the part of her that hates walking through the door stops her from loving going home.

so she doesn’t go home until it’s so dark that she admits that she’s frightened.

but for now, she sits on the floor of a forest, a dark forest that has ins and outs that she plans to discover in the years to come. the world moves in the slow circles, the trees hold her close. she’d say she feels at home here but she knows that even now she is unsafe. she grits her teeth, eyes open and wide and watching. she can’t relax, her muscles are always tense. so when she lies down in bed and has to let her eyes close, her legs and arms hurt from the day. she’s constantly vigilant, walking on tippy toes.

she walks about, the shadows frighten her but she sneers back at them. they’re just shadows. they can’t hurt her, like other things can. she’s got to get better at that, she’s got to squash her fear, just like Cas says to. she’s gotta hold herself up, he tells her to hit back, to scream, to bite, to run. she isn’t sure what she’s supposed to do if there isn’t someplace to run to. what do you do if there is no place that someone will hold you and tell you they love you? her solution: go to the forest. where trees hold her in their branches, where shadows caress her cheeks, where leaves braid her hair. and sometimes, wind plays her music when it whistles through the limbs and canopies above.

so it’s surprising to her when she hears actual music drift through her usual hiding place.

she isn’t afraid of what lurks in this place in the daylight, so she marches with loud feet, hoping that would scare the music away but it doesn’t, if anything, it grows louder. but soon, she finds that’s because she gets closer to the source. when she finds herself getting very close to her favorite clearing, she can practically feel the person’s presence in the place she loves to sit and sing and wait for dark in. she waits behind a tree, listening to the music. well, listening at first. but then, enraptured. she can’t stop listening. it’s a little messily plucked in some places but she feels as if this person is very skilled, the resonance she can recognize like it comes from her own vocal chords. the melody striking her deep inside of her. it makes her want to cry and laugh and jump and shout and smile all at once.

in a burst of energy and determination, she jumps out from behind the tree and the music abruptly stops. she’s faced with nothing more than a boy, maybe a little younger than she is but not by much. sitting in the center of the little clearing, clutching a guitar now tightly to his chest, is a boy with a shocked, frightened look in his eyes. she understands why, she’s a dirty, feral looking girl who definitely needs a bath who just jumped out of nowhere.

“what are you doing here?” she snarls, stalking forward and snapping out of her musical reverie. 

“I-I-I… um, my… I just…” he’s scared, she can see that but the way he’s cowering at her is just a little much. she’s not that much bigger than him anyways, only taller by maybe an inch.

“my name is Orpheus.”

he blurts it out like it’s a shameful sentence, like he isn’t allowed to say his name. which she didn’t ask, by the way.

“I didn’t ask you what your name was.” she crosses her arms over her chest like her mom does when she’s upset with Cas, it looks intimidating when she does it anyways.

“It’s Orpheus.”

“I know, you said it before.”

“what’s your name?”

“Eurydice.” she says proudly, she loves her name, it means Justice. that’s what her mom says at least. it rolls off the tongue easily and just sounds wonderful to her.

“that’s a funny name.” Orpheus disagrees apparently. she opens her mouth to retort angrily but before she can, he looks down at his guitar, strumming out a chord and opening his mouth, singing out one word on one note.

“Eurydice.”

she has to stop, stunned at the way he can make her already beautiful name sound so… lovely. so musical.

“nevermind,” he says. “I could write songs about your name, so that makes it good. a good name, that’s what Eurydice is, a good name.”

“you’re weird.” she says, in her sarcastic voice that her brother has been teaching her, trying to scare him away. it doesn’t work, he sticks his tongue out between his teeth, scrunching up his eyes.

“mister Hermes says that isn’t a nice word.”

“who’s mister Hermes?”

“he’s my… he’s mister Hermes.”

she tilts her head to look at him again, considering how he might come to be here with her never seeing him before in town. “is he your dad?”

Orpheus strums another chord. “I don’t have a dad.”

she bites her tongue, forcing the lie past her lips, mostly because she wants it to be true. “me neither.”

his eyes shoot up, meeting hers directly for the first time. he has good eyes, she decides, green and brown and shiny. “really?!”

she nods, tucking black hair behind her ear shyly.

“I never met someone else who didn’t have a dad! do you have a mom too? I don’t, but that’s okay, I have mister Hermes who’s real nice and talks to me and I got to play my music for him the other day, he says I’m really good and… sorry.”

“why?”

“why what?”

“why are you sorry?”

he shifts awkwardly in the grass. “I talk a lot, everyone says I should stop.”

deciding that this boy isn’t dangerous, she drops down to sit in the grass in front of him. “screw ‘em.”

he blinks at her, confused. she shrugs. “they don’t matter, not really, you be you. that’s what my brother says.”

his eyes light up. “you have a brother? that’s so cool!”

she has to laugh, because she usually doesn’t get along with kids her age this well. but Orpheus is nice, and talks too much or too little and likes her name, all of the qualifications she needs for a friend.

“so are you moving here?” she asks, hoping that the answer is yes. she could use a friend. since the current count is 0.

“we’re here on a… business trip, I think. that’s what mister Hermes said.” her heart sinks a little in her chest, of course her only potential friend is here temporarily. of course her one chance at eliminating a little of her loneliness can’t be utilized.

“oh.” he seems to recognize that that made her sad, that her expression falls after he said those words.

“sorry.”

she shakes her head. “that’s not your fault… play another note thingy on your guitar. I like the way it sounds.”

a smile works its way onto his face, he has a wonderful smile, she decides. he arranges his fingers intricately on the fretboard of his instrument and plays one beautiful note, letting it ring into the clearing and reverberate through her head. she absorbs it, taking it in and breathing it out. it almost cleanses her of her entire bad day, letting her start anew with this new cleaned out body.

“how-?” she begins before she’s cut off by a loud shout that rumbles through the forest, she jumps to her feet and scampers back into the forest before she can even stop to consider who or what it is that’s coming in their direction. a small voice follows after her but she doesn’t stop to hear what Orpheus says, instead, she puts some distance between the two of them before backtracking a little when she realizes she might’ve left Orpheus alone in danger. and she’d never leave a helpless boy to the clutches of a wild animal, that’s just not nice.

she watches from a distance as a man in a fancy silver suit comes into the clearing, taking Orpheus hand and pulling the boy to his feet.

“you know you aren’t supposed to run off like that, Orpheus.”

“I know.”

“you could’ve gotten lost or seriously injured.”

“I know.”

the man sighs. “why did you come out here? it’s just plain forest.”

“I met a girl.” Orpheus blurts out. The man gives him a strange look.

“A girl?”

“yeah, she liked my music.”

“hm,” he considers the idea for a moment, as he thinks he begins tugging Orpheus out of the clearing. “could’ve been a wood nymph.”

“what do wood nymphs look like?” Orpheus asks as he slings his guitar over his back, contentedly taking mister Hermes’ hand.

“they’re small, very pretty little things, and fearsome too.”

Orpheus nods. “she was all of those things. and she was really, really pretty so that probably means she was a princess wood nymph.”

mister Hermes laughs. “probably.”

Eurydice never thinks that she’ll ever see the boy with the guitar who loved her name ever again. and she was very wrong.


End file.
